


The First Rule

by Anonymous



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Eddie is jack's homoerotic subtext, Fight Club AU, M/M, Parody, References to Drugs, References to diseases, Richie is a basketcase, Satire, Smoking, We're entering the new year full of shame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:35:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28471758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: I told Myra I was working late, when really I was sitting in church basements throughout the city, eavesdropping and observing other people’s malfunctioning bodies, like bringing popcorn to a cancer ward. It’s funny, I’d always been terrified of death, but whenever I was sitting in a circle of people who were a few steps closer than I was, all the noise and static that followed me around like a malaria-heavy mosquito went quiet, and for the first time in my life, I found peace inside my own head.As these strangers described the worst pain imaginable, the depths of the human condition, the darkest, most disgusting diseases to crawl out of the ocean, I had to hold back a smile. This was my cure. This was my Wellbutrin. I was finally free.But then he showed up and ruined it all.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22
Collections: Anonymous





	The First Rule

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skeilig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeilig/gifts), [reigenagain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reigenagain/gifts).



> So I watched Fight Club last night with skeilig and reigenagain and we realized very quickly that the narrator is literally Eddie. As someone who unironically loves fight club, this is my gift. I shall enter the new year as I left the old: sinning. Marked as complete for now but who knows. I could continue it or I could orphan it, depends.

As I stood there in the archway of a small-town Chinese restaurant with decor so ostentatious I wondered if it was culturally insensitive, I came face to face with a man I had seen not two weeks prior in the bottom of a ditch following a near-fatal car accident on the outskirts of the Bronx. And I came to the realization that the fates of Richie Tozier and I were far more entwined than I ever could have believed.

It all started six months earlier. My raise was still awaiting approval, and I was getting restless waiting for that extra $6k to slide through my direct deposit, and was beginning to feel like a whore who’d been suspended from Square Cash without a warning. I work as a risk analyst, which means predicting the fatality of car accidents, which means placing bets on the failure rates of traffic lights and seat belts. I’d never been in a car accident before, which made me feel like a male gynecologist billing my patients for their failed c-sections. I’d never even hit a bumper or popped a tire on the curb. My insurance virginity was intact: a financial hymen sheltering my equity rates. For some reason numbers like that were important to me. I no longer got grade reports, so I settled for my monthly credit score.

I was married to a woman named Myra, an old money WASP whose Instagram was full of self-help infographics, yet in her spare time she trashed other women hard enough to be a Russian gymnastics coach. Anyone with a BMI lower than the 50th percentile was her automatic enemy, me included. Sometimes it felt nice with my face smothered against her heaving chest, other times it felt like she was trying to boil my brain so it would melt out my ears.

I’m not sure why I married Myra. I’m not sure how I got to this point in my life at all. Sure, by most standards, I had everything one could define as “successful.” My salary was creeping up on six figures, which after taxes and mortgage payments still left me with a daily allowance big enough to buy three takeout meals, a new album to listen to at the gym, a subscription to a service I didn’t need, and a couple bucks left over for the homeless people who hung around in the alcoves of my building. But I rarely carried cash, so that didn’t really factor into my budget.

I had it all. I had the Manhattan condo that once hosted sex parties for abstract expressionists. I had the refrigerator with a filter better than the entire water purification systems of 75% of the world’s countries. I had hand-tailored suits that didn’t even need to be hand-tailored, a car that could steamroll a playground, and designer ties soft enough for fetish porn.

In my spare time I spent petty cash on online slot machines while thinking up clever tweets for my viral parody account with the title ‘Common White Girl Problems.’ I earned an extra grand a month with the brand deals. I didn’t need the money, but watching those little notification numbers rise above the bell icon was even more satisfying than hitting a jackpot on my online slots. Twice a day I’d tweet something along the lines of ‘Soy latte with oat milk,’ and garner 14,000 retweets in the time it took to respond to an email. It was better than heroin.

My only real source of unhappiness was my clinical health anxiety, which probably developed while I was still in the womb and could feel my mother shoving chocolate cake directly into my placenta. When you have hypochondria your body is never truly yours. You feel like a lab rat being watched by a group of scientists hovering above you with clipboards and masks, meticulously tracking your behavior. The only thing is you don’t know whether you’ve been given the poison or the placebo. They know; but you don’t.

So you scurry around, trying to stay distracted while monitoring every symptom: diarrhea, headache, neck pain, foot cramp, excess hunger, enlarged pore, infected hair follicle, little clues that could either be a normal part of the human condition or a spiked speed bump. You won’t know until it’s too late. And it will always be too late. You tell yourself all you need is the right medication to change the entire mechanism of your brain. I’d been on some cocktail of prescriptions since undergrad. I'd swallowed so many pills I no longer had a functioning gag reflex, upping one dose and downing another, first keeping track of my side effects in a little journal, then an app that got sued for selling my data to big pharma. I was a lab rat, plain and simple. I would stare at my Excel sheets while lightly bouncing on my exercise ball chair growing nauseous as I ate my spinach salad and wondered if that speck of red in my shit this morning was blood or the tomato soup I had for lunch yesterday.

I started masturbating at work, seeing if I would get caught. It started with just watching muted porn in the corner of my monitor, occasionally catching my eye as I typed out email reminders. At first it was just generic soft core fucking: like watching a livestream of an oil rig. But I slowly upped the ante. I left my office door unlocked, waiting for someone to walk in on me jacking it to a video titled ‘Stepdaughter fucks uncle’s cousin’s father’s granddaughter,’ or something or other. But no one ever did. The underside of my desk looked like the table of a school cafeteria, except the gum was replaced with cum, an important distinction of one consonant.

I was stuck, ready to blow my brains out on a moment's notice. And as I sat in my corner office on the 18th floor and fantasized about smashing my ergonomically friendly desk against the glass and jumping to the street below Great Depression style, I wondered, would anyone notice if my Common White Girl account stopped updating? Is that what I would be leaving behind in the world? A couple thousand half-witty tweets about hot yoga and amazon wishlists. Would that be my legacy?

The support group thing was a lifesaver. I was standing at the copying machine waiting for a 300-page document on black ice collisions to finish printing when Dan came over and stood uncomfortably close, waiting his turn in the queue. I asked if he had any plans that night, intending for it to be nothing more than polite workplace chatter. But he made things weird by revealing that he had a narcotics anonymous meeting and asked if I wanted to tag along. I didn’t even have the energy to feel offended that Dan thought I was an addict. I’d stayed clear of hard drugs due to my anxiety, but I was steadily reaching the precipice of self-destruction and the thought of developing a cocaine addiction was getting more appealing by the day.

The support group met in a large community center. We were in a gym that had a pile of deflated basketballs in the corner and the nets torn to tatters. I sat on a hard metal chair in a circle of junkies, fidgeting in their seats and trying to discreetly check their phones as they waited for their turn to talk. Some were on the run from loan sharks and others were stressing about how their coke habit would disrupt their vacation to the Hamptons. When it came to my turn I made up some lie about how I was dropping lines at work and just had nasal reconstruction surgery. Afterwards one of them asked for a reference for my plastic surgeon.

But it wasn’t the narcotics anonymous that got me hooked. As I was leaving, at the bottom of the staircase beneath the row of South American flags, I looked into another room with a handwritten sign taped to the door that read ‘Liver Cancer.’ My mother had just died from liver cancer, which meant my odds of getting it were inflated, so I figured ethically there was no harm in dropping by. And when I looked around the room of pale, emaciated zombies with tear tracks seared into their cheeks like river dams, I knew I had found my people.

I cried harder than ever before that night, pressed into the shoulder of a woman who used to be a doctor, but her alcoholism cost her everything, and now here she was: stage three cancer crying in a rundown community center against the chest of a middle-age risk analyst feeding off her misery like a leech on a tit. I rarely touched Myra anymore, much less hugged her, and in spite of myself, as this woman buried her face in my chest, I found myself growing hard.

It became an addiction. Monday’s were for Huntington’s Disease, Tuesdays were my anorexia nights, Wednesday was liver cancer, Thursdays a double feature of type 2 diabetes and malignant melanoma. Then Friday nights were the main event after all the foreplay: HIV/AIDS, the crowning jewel, my perfect escape.

I told Myra I was working late, when really I was sitting in church basements throughout the city, eavesdropping and observing other people’s malfunctioning bodies, like bringing popcorn to a cancer ward. It’s funny, I’d always been terrified of death, but whenever I was sitting in a circle of people who were a few steps closer than I was, all the noise and static that followed me around like a malaria-heavy mosquito went quiet, and for the first time in my life, I found peace inside my own head.

As these strangers described the worst pain imaginable, the depths of the human condition, the darkest, most disgusting diseases to crawl out of the ocean, I had to hold back a smile. This was my cure. This was my Wellbutrin. I was finally free.

But then he showed up and ruined it all.

Richie Tozier. That dirty cocksucker. He showed up at Huntington’s on Monday night, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a pair of sunglasses that did nothing to hide his neanderthal features that any paparazzo could recognize two cities away. He sat there in the corner smoking, not speaking, and I fumed harder than his cheap cigarettes. He was invading my space, disrupting my therapy.

I saw him again and again, with his ridiculous thrifted shirts and stupid leather jacket, looking strung out and high at the same time. He always looked like a wreck, which is why no one ever told him to leave, yet I knew the truth: Richie Tozier was perfectly healthy. His insides were as clean and pure as if he’d just emerged from a colon hydrotherapy clinic. He was a faker. He didn’t need this. He was a celebrity. He could have been at a thousand other venues in the city snorting shit from Colombia and amassing all the diseases he lacked, but instead he was here, the one place I needed him out.

When he crashed my AIDS night I knew that was the last straw. After the session was over, after we had our group cries and finished guided meditation, I would grab him by the short hairs and call him out right to his face. I’d threaten to expose him. I had a Twitter account with 500,000 followers, and while I’d never used it for anything except tweeting snappy one-liners about kombucha, I had no qualms about plastering his smug disease-free face all over the web, exposing him for his lies.

“Hey,” I said, approaching him from behind as he refilled his coffee at the small plastic table.

“Yeah?” he replied, turning around, his cigarette smoldering in his mouth, his sunglasses still perched on his nose.

I lean in close. “I know your game,” I whisper. “I’ve seen you at the other sessions.”

He shrugs. “Yeah? I’ve seen you too. What are we?”

I grab his arm and pull him into the nearest corner. Up close he’s taller than I realized. The fucking bastard.

“This isn’t funny. I need this shit. You’re a celebrity. You shouldn’t be doing shit like this. What if you get caught?”

“You probably earn more than me, Gucci boy. What’s your game plan if someone rats you out?”

“No one knows my real name.”

“Ah, right, Hemingway,” he says smugly, looking down at the fake name tag sticker over my heart. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. What’s your damage? Why do you come?”

I sigh, a vein pulsing in my head. I hate him. I hate his smug smile and the quirk in his voice. I hate his lack of shame, his chain-smoking, and stupid leather jacket. I hate all of it.

“I have clinical hypochondria. Being around these people is the only thing that helps.”

“Oh yeah? Why is that?”

I sigh, reminding myself I don’t owe him shit.

“I don’t know. When you feel like you’re dying every second of every day, being around people who are actually dying helps put things in perspective.”

“Fair enough,” he says, taking a sip of his coffee. He’s holding his cigarette in the same hand as his cup, and I can’t help but wonder if there’s ash floating on the surface.

“But you don’t understand,” I say with desperation in my tone, reaching out to grab his lapel. “If another healthy person is here it doesn’t work. So you need to leave.”

“Tough shit. I’ve got just as much of a right to be here as you.”

“Okay, then why do you do it?” I ask.

He hums, then lets out a short laugh. “My act has been pretty dry recently. I need some material to spice things up.”

My jaw drops. “You’re coming to support groups… for comedy material?”

He shrugs. “Beats people-watching in Central Park.”

His cigarette has burned down to the stub now, and he extinguishes it on the concrete wall behind him, the sparks petering out and dropping flaccid to the floor.

“But hey, I just need to stay till I can get an hour out of material. Then I’ll be out of your hair.”

“No, you need to stop now,” I say. I must look like a crazy person. And maybe I am.

“Get bent,” he says, then pulls away and starts walking towards the exit. I follow after him, out onto the sidewalk, the stench of old trash a welcome aroma.

“Okay, how’s this, we’ll split up the week,” I say, following two steps behind him. “You can have Huntington’s and melanoma.”

“I want anorexia,” he says dryly, not even turning his head to acknowledge me.

I let out a laugh. “Not to fat shame you, but I can pass for anorexic a lot easier than you.”

He flips me off right before walking directly into traffic, the cars skidding and honking as he cuts across the road and I dash after him.

“Fine, take anorexia,” I concede while following him into a bodega with harsh florescent lights and bulletproof glass covering the register. “I’ll take liver cancer and melanoma.”

“No, you don’t get both cancers,” he retaliates while pulling random items off the shelf and stuffing them in his pockets: a pack of gum, some Ritz crackers, a bag of Skittles, and a pink lighter. I follow him up to the register.

“Okay, I get liver cancer though. My mom died from it, I’m entitled to it.”

“Fine,” Richie spits back, walking back out the door without a backwards glance.

“Wait, you didn’t pay for any of that,” I shout. He ignores me, continuing to walk, lighting another cigarette with his new lighter which couldn’t have been priced at more than 99 cents. What a fucking basket case.

“Okay, you get anorexia, melanoma, and Huntington’s. How’s that sound?”

“I want AIDS,” he says, right before stepping into a small Chinese restaurant that seemed to emerge out of nowhere. I follow him inside. It’s cramped and smells weird, the specials listed with yellow-tinted pictures above the white tile register.

“No, I want AIDS,” I shout back, louder than I should. The teenage girl working the register looks up from her phone.

“Why should I give you AIDS?” Richie asks, pointing his cigarette at me accusingly.

“Please, I need AIDS.” I’m on the verge of begging. “AIDS is my fucking lifeline.”

The girl is staring between the two of us, her eyes darting back and forth like she’s watching a pingpong match.

Richie hums, thinking. “Fine, we’ll share AIDS. Every other week.”

“Deal,” I say, extending my hand. He shakes it once, then retracts his hand and buries it in the bowl of fortune cookies sitting on the counter. He stuffs at least five of them in his pocket, three more falling to the floor, and turns around and walks back out the door.

I stand there in stunned silence for a moment. I look down at the girl, and we exchange a glance of mutual resignation, then I follow Richie back out the door.

“Wait!” I shout. Richie is already standing in the middle of the street, cars blaring at him from both directions. “We should probably exchange numbers!” I shout, hoping he can hear me. “Just in case we want to change nights.”

He looks exacerbated, but at least he starts walking back towards me, looking like he wouldn’t mind at all if a car rammed him down. His insurance wouldn't pay shit if he got hit. Tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills, his life insurance a complete wash.

“Fine,” he says, pulling a pen from his pocket. He pulls off the cap and grabs my hand, scribbling his number so hard it feels like he’s trying to tattoo it. When he’s finished he hands the pen to me, and I do the same, being sure to press even harder, a satisfying red border emerging on his skin around the black ink.

“Guess this is goodbye then.” I hand the pen back to him.

“Guess so.” He turns and walks back into the street. He makes it to the parallel yellow lines before turning back to face me.

“By the way, what’s your name?!” he shouts. “Are any of those bullshit names you give real?!”


End file.
